A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a radical cultural shift.
Putting a lot of thought in the early phases of product design clashes against the “faster, cheaper,” “let’s see if it sticks” IT culture. Reaching out to people outside the company to discover solutions, ideas, and opportunities is unsettling for companies in which “the boss” makes all decisions and sets all strategic directions. True user-centered design requires a flatter, more democratic, and distributed corporate structure to work.
Because adopting a user-centered framework requires a cultural paradigm shift we often need to start small and proceed slowly to avoid a massive immune rejection response from the corporate culture. The good news is that in each company there are pockets of user knowledge that designers can easily leverage to get important user information.
I recently worked as a user experience consultant for a department that was unfamiliar with usability and user research. This department created print designs and some senior managers felt that it was time to start using a user-centered approach, especially when designing forms. Traditionally, their print design was created by directly translating the project charter created by marketing and business in a product; in practice, this meant that the design team based its decisions on information received exclusively from management–the higher the better. There was little or no communication with the user base and little or no testing; there was no measure of the usability of the final product.
My first step was to take the entire project team where people answered phones and processed paper forms. We interviewed and observed those who stand at the interface between the company and our clients. We talked to new hires, very tenured representatives, and people in the middle, and we collected information on our clients’ needs and behaviors; we asked about what worked and what didn’t work in our forms and other printed material we mail to our clients.
For the team, this was a eye-opening experience. They realized that if management could provide the strategy, people who work in direct contact with clients can provide amazing insights on how to design a better product.
This simple discovery was way more impressive to them than leaning about sophisticated user research techniques, observing interviews with clients, visiting fancy usability labs, and being educated in user-centered design. Because all these things were out of their reach: each of them requires time and money these teams don’t have. Walking to the next building and talking to our reps, however, is something that they can do anytime and on their own.
The people who inhabit the surface between the company and the client represent the greatest opportunity to initiate the transformation from a business-centered system to a user-centered one, because getting to them is fast and cheap, and their knowledge and insights are immediately evident and clearly valuable.
And here comes the inevitable question: “Why can’t we just talk to managers? After all managers have contact with several reps, are more expert, more senior, more skilled, probably more likely to see patterns.”
Talking to managers is not that useful when we want to understand our clients because they are far removed from the direct experience of the clients. The role of managers is to manage the team, not to get insights on the user experience.
Managers deal with abstract data, reps deal with concrete experiences. Our brain analyzes very differently abstract data and experiences. Experiences are rich, multidimensional, multimodal, integrated; many of the attributes of experiences are difficult to abstract, rationalize, and verbalize or even to pull into awareness. And yet, they powerfully influence our understanding of things and events and our decision making. Abstract data are rational, easy to verbalize, and conscious (although sometimes insights that came from abstract data have the same ineffable quality of a concrete experience).
Of course, it’s not a matter of taking literally what we hear from our reps (and here is where experience, skill, and talent of the user experience specialist come into play, for example in how to ask the questions and how to use the answers); nor it’s a matter of implementing all the solutions they propose (although sometimes they are damn good solutions). It’s a matter of listening and paying attention: every bit of information our reps provide brings a little more understanding around the nature of the problem, even when they don’t come up with good or viable solutions to fix it.
I would push this even further: interviewing and observing people within the company who have different views of the clients (people who talk to them, people who process their forms, people who meet them in person) allowed us to gather a richness of data we would have never gotten by just interviewing or observing clients.
Each client is a point in time and space. Our reps have experience with hundreds of clients. So, even if interviewing them doesn’t bring the immediacy and richness of a user interview, it brings the ability to perceive patterns, to see what typically happens, as well as awareness of rare but important instances of issues. Clients tell a story about themselves. Reps tell the story of our clients’s relationship with the company.
When it’s possible, we should do both: talking with and observing reps and talking with and observing clients. But I would argue that we should go inside first and harvest the untapped knowledge hidden inside our company. Let’s mine the gold in our own backyard first.
The team I worked with has taken a first but very important step toward putting the client at the center of the design process. If they’ve taken away one thing from this experience, I hope it’s this: “The first thing to do when we start a project is talking with the people who interact with our clients. And no, interviewing their managers won’t work.”
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Tags: User Research, direct experience, abstraction, design, interface design
May 9, 2006
Great post, Antonella. I agree with you. It is irrresponsible not to leverage the knowledge and experience of any internal resource that may have insight into the relative business processes.
Speaking with the client is critical, but understanding the associated business processes is important, as well, for two reasons. First, this discussion will better prepare the business analyst for her conversation with the client. Second, review and documentation of the business process can uncover process improvement opportunities with savings (or re-capture) of dollars equal to or greater than that expected from the technology implementation.
One of my gigs is facilitating JAD sessions and I have never (ever) facilitated a session in which a broken business process wasn’t uncovered. Of course, identifying broken business processes if much easier than convincing a client to own up to it, which in turn is much easier than convincing him to do something about it.
July 17, 2006
[…] A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift. […]